The World is Calling: Exploring the Finest Travel Watches

‘To travel is to live,’ as quoted Hans Christian Anderson, and we couldn’t agree more.

The freedom to explore far-off lands was a luxury many of us once took for granted, and were brought sharply down to earth—literally—by the interminable COVID years. Today, with those restrictions behind us and with people being the contrary creatures they are, all that time denied the chance to roam wherever and whenever we liked has fuelled a renewed obsession with travelling the world.

This year, the tourism industry is predicting its highest ever global revenues, surpassing even pre-pandemic levels, as around 1.5 billion of us succumb to wanderlust and jet off to experience the sights and sounds of one exotic locale or another.

But whether it’s for business or a well-earned vacation, the key to a successful trip is packing the right essentials. And nothing is more critical than choosing the perfect watch.

As an indicator as to just how loudly the travel business is booming, demand for luxury watches built for globetrotting has never been higher. Next to chronographs and divers, travel watches offer the most popular types of complications on the market. But what constitutes a travel watch?

Essentially, it boils down to the one designed to make a life on the road easier. We have all suffered through the abject misery of jetlag and, while a thankfully temporary affliction, that feeling of crushing daytime fatigue and general malaise can quite easily steal the joy of experiencing a new location. And it is even more challenging if you are only going away for a short break.

A watch that can display both your home time and the time at your eventual destination simultaneously has been scientifically proven to help fight off the worst of jetlag’s psychological effects. The problem of creating a watch that can show multiple time zones concurrently has given rise to a number of solutions. The most common, and the one perhaps most elegant in its simplicity, is the humble GMT.

When the conversation turns to GMT watches, there can only be one name that springs to mind; the beginning, middle and end of all such models, Rolex’s seminal GMT-Master. It is only right, of course, seeing as how the Swiss watchmaking behemoth invented the thing in the first place. The name stems from Greenwich Mean Time, the yearly average of the time each day as the sun crosses the Prime Meridian, as measured at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. Although this time standard has since been replaced by UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time, GMT was still in use in the 1950s, the dawn of the jet age.

It was an era in aviation awash with names that today conjure up images of the long-forgotten glamour of air travel. Those earliest aircraft; the Boeing 707, Convair 880 and Douglas DC-8, flew the original intercontinental routes established by legendary but now-defunct airlines such as BOAC, TWA and Pan American World Airways. The speed of travel gave rise to the new phenomenon of jetlag, and it was a cooperative effort between Rolex and Pan Am that created 1954’s debut GMT-Master, the ref. 6542.

It was a watch that was most notable for achieving a great deal with a remarkable lack of complexity. The combination of a rotating bezel marked with a 24-hour scale and a conventional time-and-date movement fitted with the addition of a second hour hand geared to run at half the speed of the regular one, meant Rolex smartly addressed the two time zone challenge with the least amount of fuss. All wearers had to do was turn the bezel until the GMT hand lined up with the hour at your intended location.

Whether that convenience alone would have elevated the GMT-Master to the illustrious status it enjoys today is up for debate. But the watch, and the series as a whole, were to become iconic due to the design decision which coloured their bezels in two different shades. The first and most celebrated, the blue and red quickly christened by fans as the ‘Pepsi’, would be joined by a host of others over the seven decades the watch has remained in production. From the lost and lamented red and black ‘Coke’, the brown and gold ‘Root Beer’, the blue and black ‘Batman’ and the quirky left-handed 'Sprite', the GMT- Master is still the dual time zone watch by which all others are measured.

Obviously though, it is not the only one out there, and much like with their Submariner, Rolex’s originator has been used as ‘inspiration’ by myriad others. Look at practically every tool watch manufacturer and you will find one interpretation or another, with seemingly everyone from Timex to TAG Heuer including a clone of some sort on their books. Not surprisingly, one of the most successful of recent years has come from Tudor.

Rolex’s sister company released a Pepsi-bezeled Black Bay GMT in 2018, looking not like a modern GMT-Master II but rather a vintage model from 70-years ago. The brushed steel, riveted bracelet and muted aluminium bezel won legions of vintage fans and the range has since been supplemented with a massively popular white dial variant and, most recently, an even more retro 39mm Coke bezel piece, filling a 17-year gap in the Rolex colour range.

Looking through the massive number of travel watches on offer, you will likely see the terms GMT and dual time used interchangeably. Although similar, they are not exactly the same.

A dual time watch, as the name suggests, is capable of displaying two different times, the second typically on a separate sub dial. These generally work on a 12- hour scale with an additional AM and PM indicator, but can also have a 24-hour scale which doesn’t need one. A GMT watch is one that usually relies on an extra hour hand, a 24-hour scale around the bezel, dial perimeter or rehaut and the wearer doing some very basic maths. All things being equal, a dual time is marginally easier to use, but there isn’t really much in it.

However, because of the increased level of mechanical complexity in a dual time watch, they tend to live at the upper end of the horology scale. The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Dual Time, for example, manages to somehow fit not only a 12-hour second time sub dial with day/night indicator but also a power reserve display and a calendar dial all into a relatively small 39mm case without it looking the least bit cramped.

Other manufactures play with the format a little. The Patek Philippe Aquanaut Travel Time ref. 5164A, released in 2011, was the first in the Aquanaut collection to feature any complication other than a date. It uses two central hour hands, a solid one to show the time in your current, or local, setting and a skeletonized one to display the time back home. Pushers on the left flank jump the local hand forward or backward an hour at a time, disconnected from the home time or, when not in use, can be made to sit on top of each other and move synchronously. A pair of apertures at the 3.30 and 8.30 also act as day or night markers.

Their proprietary Travel Time complication is one you will find across several of Patek’s collections. The Calatrava Pilot Travel Time 5524 in either white or rose gold uses the same 26-330 S C FUS movement as the Aquanaut, while the 5520 Alarm Travel Time from the Grand Complication series adds a 24-hour striking gong Mechanism. One watch that rather lives in-between travel watch definitions is another Rolex, their most complicated model to date, the Sky-Dweller.

Released in 2012, this massively impressive piece offered a new take on the ultimate travel companion which blurred the lines between GMT and dual time zone. With its unique 24-hour sub dial disc it might actually qualify as both, except it has no additional hour hand to indicate the second time zone and instead uses a stationary arrow and the disc itself moves, jumping forward or back in one hour increments—suggesting a true GMT. Whatever it is, the fact it has not just that hybrid complication but also an ingenious annual calendar makes it a formidable engineering achievement.

Being able to read the time in two places is all very well, but if there is one style of watch which really epitomises the romance of travel, it has to be the world timer. Rather than merely pointing a hand at a set of ambiguous numbers, the world timer actually puts names to the hours, with most representing the earth’s 24 time zones with a list of two dozen major cities printed on the chapter ring around the perimeter of the dial, with a second corresponding 24-hour GMT disc letting you know instantly what time it is in that glamorous location.

Seeing the likes of Cairo or La Paz, Beijing or Dhaka on your wrist can’t help but fire the imagination, and world timers make up some of the most visually striking models in any manufacture’s repertoire.

There are several variations on the main theme, but in general, a world timer works by setting your local time as a reference, either at the direct top or bottom of the dial. This is usually done with the crown or a pusher on the case which will advance the city disc or the GMT disc, or in some cases both, one step. It also adjusts the main hand in hourly intervals until the correct time for your current location is displayed. From there, it is simplicity itself to read off the dial what time it is in any part of the world. Should you be travelling, world timers are also perhaps the easiest type of travel watch to adjust on the go, as well as presenting the most information at a glance.

Best of all, excellent world time watches run the entire gamut of the pricing scale. Budget-friendly brands such as Tissot, Raymond Weil, Christopher Ward and Rado all have superb examples on offer for £2,000 or less, while Omega’s beautiful Aqua Terra World Timer Master Chronometer can be had for around £9,000.

But, for the real last word in such watches we have to once again turn to Patek. Of the surprisingly numerous collection of world timers in their portfolio, the 5231 is among the most impressive. Living in the Complications range, the watch continues the long tradition of including a Grand Feu cloisonné enamel map of different regions in the dial centre.

There are as many different travel watches as there are destinations to wear them, and whichever you elect to take on your next trip, we wish you bon voyage.